Beyond Method #2: Your Window to the Internet

Personal Start Pages: iGoogle vs. Netvibes

Which customizable homepage would be the best option for librarians? I think it depends on your needs and preferences.

If you're a librarian looking to quickly create a public face for your library and your web skills are limited, I believe Netvibes could serve that purpose up to a point. (As it's been noted, iGoogle does not have a public view of its dashboard.) As Cranbury Public Library (Cranbury, N.J.) and Dublin City Public Libraries (Dublin, Ireland) have shown us, it's certainly an option. However, Netvibes in itself is just a portal; it can't hold much content beyond links and imported material, such as images from Flickr galleries.This is a major limitation.

For personal start pages that do not hinge on the need for public access, I gravitate toward both Netvibes and iGoogle for different reasons. I like Netvibes for its clean look. Its used of tabs at the top are nicer to look at and positioned in a more predictable manner than iGoogles, which are on the side. While the widgets are not too different from iGoogle's, the layout can be customized to a greater degree. Its widget search seems to yield more relevant tools as well, a big plus.

However, iGoogle has one advantage going for it: I already have a Google account, so I don't need to create another one to access iGoogle. Using Netvibes would mean creating yet another username and password that I'd have to remember. But I wouldn't necessarily call it a major advantage.

The look of iGoogle is surprisingly ho-hum. It lacks the minimalism of the Google homepage and the most of the design themes you can choose from yield color schemes that are either epileptic or illegible, in which you can read the module titles very well. Its integration of Google products is still somewhat clunky. Perhaps most maddeningly of all, when you use the Google search bar at the top, it takes you away from your iGoogle page — in NetVibes, it opens up a new tab within Netvibes, allowing you to keep your original start page open.

Nevertheless, in library school (not so many months ago), I did use iGoogle a great deal. I wasn't aware of Netvibes at the time, but I think I would have still stuck with iGoogle because I used a great deal of Google products for school. I created a start page that gave me access to my Google Bookmarks and my Google Reader feed, along with a calendar, the local weather, a countdown until graduation. It was a useful tool as I commuted back and forth, sometimes several times a day, between class and home.

Image by Perry G available through an Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial No Derivatives 2.0 license.